Msgr Felix Machado is the archbishop of Vasai and president of the Office for Ecumenism and Interfaith Affairs of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences. For him, “It is not just where Catholics are that the Church must go.” The papal visit is not a waste of time. He was in Abu Dhabi from 3 to 5 February along with the pontiff for an international interfaith meeting called Human Brotherhood. This will be the first visit by a Pope to the Arabian Peninsula. The archbishop’s comments follow.

The visit of the Pope to UAE is very important. There are conservative and politicized voices which criticize Pope’s visit, saying that it is a waste of time to invest Pope’s efforts on a visit to a place where there is no native Catholic. It is not just where Catholics are that the Church must go. We must go to such places where there are no Catholics, precisely to explore the possibilities for the future.

Pakistani authorities have moved Asia Bibi, a Christian woman recently acquitted of blasphemy charges, to a new “secure area” and are barring her from leaving the country, a close friend and rights campaigner has claimed.

Bibi, who spent eight years on death row, was transferred from a location near the capital to a house in the southern port city of Karachi, her friend Aman Ullah told the Associated Press. She and her husband are locked in a single room in a house where the door opens only “at food times,” he added.

Canada has offered her asylum and she wants to join her daughters there. Pakistani authorities have said she is free to travel, but  Bibi, 54, says she is being prevented from going.

“She has no indication of when she will leave,” said Ullah, who added that Bibi was frightened and frustrated. “They are not telling her why she cannot leave.” He spoke to her by telephone, after the threats from extremists angered by his assistance to Bibi forced him to flee the country.

Ullah has been liaising with diplomats over the case, and he says they were told Bibi’s departure would only come “in the medium-term.”

Publicly, Pakistani authorities insist that Bibi is free both inside Pakistan, and to leave it. “She is living with her family and given requisite security for safety,” the information minister, Fawad Chaudhry, told the AP in an email.

He said the government was responsible for taking “all possible measures” to protect her and her family, adding that “she is a free citizen after her release from jail and can move anywhere in Pakistan or abroad.”

At least seven churches and their communities have been suppressed in recent months in the diocese of Qiqihar, whose bishop, Msgr Giuseppe Wei Jingyi is recognized by the Holy See, but not by the government. Members of the United Front, police, representatives of the Religious Affairs Bureau entered the churches while mass was being celebrated, interrupted the liturgical services, chased the faithful away, threatened them and decreed the closure of the communities. The priests were asked to leave the territory if they did not want to be forcibly expelled. The suppressed communities are all “underground,” that is unregistered. However, until now they had good relations with the local authorities. There are two curious facts: first of all the suppression began at the end of September, shortly after the signing of the agreement between China and the Vatican (22 September) and the lifting of the excommunication of the official bishop of the area, Msgr Giuseppe Yue Fushen of Harbin; secondly, it should be emphasized that Msgr Wei, despite being an underground bishop, also enjoyed good relations with the authorities. The dynamics of the suppressions reflect the implementation of the new regulations for religious activities (launched in February 2018), which provide for the elimination of the underground Church. The implementation has been ongoing since the end of September, as if the China-Vatican agreement had precipitated the times: as a sign of challenge, or of the united front’s certainty towards the Vatican.

Cardinal Fernando Filoni, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, followed the delicate and complex path of the Catholic Church in China since 1992, the year of its arrival in Hong Kong. In those same years the diplomatic detente began between the People’s Republic of China and the Holy See, with the first contacts between members of the Secretariat of State and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Beijing. Your Eminence, for several years now you have led the Dicastery of the Holy See responsible for evangelization, with particular reference to the so-called “mission” territories. Cardinal Fernando said the following on  the pastoral significance of the “Provisional Agreement on the Appointment of Bishops” signed by the Holy See and the Chinese Government on 22 September 2018?

“Since the Dicastery that I oversee has a particular responsibility for accompanying the Church in China, I feel particularly called upon to speak about the pastoral significance of the Provisional Agreement. But I think Pope Francis said it best when, in his Message to the Catholics of China last September, he wrote: Furthermore, “The Provisional Agreement signed with the Chinese authorities, while limited to certain aspects of the Church’s life and necessarily capable of improvement, can contribute – for its part – to writing this new chapter of the Catholic Church in China. For the first time, the Agreement sets out stable elements of cooperation between the state authorities and the Apostolic See, in the hope of providing the Catholic community with good shepherds.”